"I've been in training, visiting internal stakeholders, and am flying to the US this week [to meet Dell execs]. When I get back I'll do a tour of duty meetings partners and customers," Vanhamme said.

Dell's networking and server division is growing nicely - compared to its classic PC business - with sales up 18 per cent year on year to $2.62bn in its fourth fiscal quarter of 2013, which ended on 1 February.

The networking unit grew 42 per cent, but the high-performance rack, modular and blade switches biz carrying the Force 10 brand more than doubled year on year.

Prior to joining Huawei, Vanhamme was a senior Euro cheese at Cisco for more than seven years.

He told The Channel that his new paymaster has a "very strategic and longstanding focus on converged infrastructure for the enterprise".

Not so according to HP's Stephen DeWitt, senior veep for global marketing within the Enterprise Group, who claimed at last week's HP Global Partner Conference that his employers invented the sector.

"Why? We had the intellectual property in-house, that is one of the potential differences between HP and the rest of the tech companies, we are a portfolio company," said DeWitt.

"Many tried to copy us, companies like Dell, but very few companies are portfolio companies like us. It is absurd to believe that an industry consortium can pull together the tight integration."

He said the way the tech sector sells compute, networking and storage is radically changing, and customers demand services in real time, and a converged infrastructure delivers this.

In its recently filed numbers for Q1 fiscal 2013, ended 31 January, HP enjoyed a four per cent yea-on-year jump in sales at its networking division to $608m. ®